Take it Nice and Easy - One day at a time

"I live one day at a time, one day at a time. Yesterday's gone and tomorrow is blind, so I live one day at a time." Willie Nelson

Without us perhaps quite noticing, much of what we place our hopes in will be ready for us in a very a long time indeed, in months or even decades from now (if ever): the successful completion of a novel, a sufficient sum of money to buy a house or begin a new career, the discovery of a suitable partner, a move to another country. In the list of our most intensely-felt hopes, few entries stand to come to fruition this season or next, let alone by one day or two.

What is a single day worth after all? It is just a day where we have only done so much and there is an awful lot more to get done. But occasionally, life happens and places us in a situation where our normal long-range hopeful way of thinking grows impossible to an extend where it broadens ones perspective of what a single day might actually be worth.

One-day-at-a-time-thinking reminds us that, in many cases, our greatest enemy is that otherwise critical nectar: hope and the perplexing emotion it tends to bring with it, impatience.

Taking life day by day means reducing the degree of control we expect to be able to bring to bear on the uncertain future. It means recognising that we have no serious capacity to exercise our will on a span of years and should not therefore disdain a chance to secure one or two minor wins in the hours ahead of us.

The future is completely intangible and, unless you’re a believer in fate, is as yet completely undecided.

It can only be shaped by the things you do every day, and the decisions you make in the present. Even then, you can never be quite sure what’s coming your way.

Essentially, the only thing you have any influence over is today, so, logically, the present is the only thing you should spend your time worrying about.

We should – from a new perspective – count ourselves immensely grateful if, by nightfall, there have been no further arguments and no more seizures, if the rain has let off and we have found one or two interesting pages to read.

As life as a whole grows more complicated, we can remember to unclench and smile a little along the way, rather than jealously husbanding our reserves of joy for a finale somewhere in the nebulous distance.

Given the scale of what we are up against, knowing that perfection may never occur, and that far worse may be coming our way, we can stoop to accept with fresh gratitude a few of the minor gifts that are already within our grasp.

We might look with fresh energy at a cloud, a duck, a butterfly or a flower. At twenty, we might scoff at the suggestion – for there seem so many larger, grander things to hope for than these evanescent manifestations of nature: romantic love, career fulfillment or political change. But with time, almost all one’s more revolutionary aspirations tend to take a hit, perhaps a very large one.

One encounters some of the intractable problems of intimate relationships. One suffers the gap between one’s professional hopes and the available realities. One has a chance to observe how slowly and fitfully the world ever alters in a positive direction. One is fully inducted to the extent of human wickedness and folly – and to one’s own eccentricity, selfishness and madness.

And so natural beauty may take on a different hue; no longer a petty distraction from a mighty destiny, no longer an insult to ambition, but a genuine pleasure amidst a litany of troubles, an invitation to bracket anxieties and keep self-criticism at bay, a small resting place for hope in a sea of disappointment; a proper consolation – for which one is finally ready, on an afternoon walk, to be appropriately grateful.

It’s normal enough to hold out for all that we want. But if we reach the end of the day and no one has died, no further limbs have broken, a few lines have been written or read and one or two encouraging and pleasant things have been said or heard, then that is already an achievement worthy of a place at the altar of sanity.

How natural and tempting to put one’s faith in the bountifulness of the years, but how much wiser it might be be to bring all one’s faculties of appreciation and love to bear on that most modest and most easily-dismissed of increments: the day already in hand.